digital strategy and concept development

Why you shouldn’t build an app

Apps are not the answer.

With all the choices you can make for engaging people through their mobile phones, apps should be considered a last resort. Why?

Asking people to install an app means friction.

They want to do something;

They see the download app page;

Tap and go to the App Store page;

Wait for the app to install;

Have to login again.

At every step along the way you can lose people. Scratch that. At every step along the way you will lose people. Why?

The reason I hear most often is: so that you have your app on their phone and people can return easily. But do they?

Most people are not like you. Many of the people who read this will be tech early adopters, so it’s likely you use many apps and install them easily. But the typical US smartphone owner downloads ZERO apps per month (other estimates put it at 1.5 per month).

Apps are expensive to develop and maintain, difficult to make quick adjustments due to submission review processes, and not as engaging as other options.

So what other options do you have?

If you think you can get people to install your app, it means you believe you already have their attention. Great.

So you have two things to worry about:

Can the core functionality be achieved through mobile web?

If yes, then the next question is: how do I keep people coming back?

And if your core functionality is “I want to be able to send push notifications” then there may still be better ways. In music, examples of core functionality that may be hard to work around are:

Music listening in background, eg. when the phone is in the pocket and you’re doing other stuff.

Functionality that’s available when the user is offline.

But I digress, because often those functions may be ‘nice to haves’ and may not be essential. Imagine if a venue has a site where you can check upcoming gigs and also listen to some music… Now a marketing manager there may say: “we absolutely need people to be able to listen to music in the background.” But you can achieve this more easily by offering a Spotify playlist.

Back to push notifications. Keep your eye on messaging apps, because they’re steadily becoming the new social networks and they’re notification-based.

In order to hold onto people’s attention, you may not need push notifications. You need habit. This requires consistency from your side and design thinking on how to construct a habit forming product that people don’t forget about.

You may also use reminders. You could collect email addresses or even phone numbers.